Sooner rather than later we’ll finally get around to the use of the new Rehab Corridor Tools to do Intersection reconstruction and other similar dicey roadway rehab and reconstruction tasks in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2018.1.

We released a new Subassembly AddOn for Civil 3D 2018.1 with more than few helpful Style tool adjustments. Yes. There are Code Set Style tool improvements in there too. This is free for InstantOn and Jump Kit 7 2018 customers. I thought it best to first help people get to work.

That more advanced and nuanced Civil 3D production work is made possible thanks to some unexpected help from other Civil 3D 2018 software feature updates. Trust me. We will get there.

In Civil 3D Workflow Matters

You can probably guess that the updated Civil 3D Civil 3D 2018.1 Help files probably won’t help you much all by themselves. You should still read them for a couple of minutes a day.

For reasons unknown Autodesk held back some of the essential conceptual workflow mechanics and some pretty necessary details from the current Civil 3D 2018.1 Help files. I suppose as usual we’re supposed to read the minds of programmers and read ahead to the future with only a partial build of the tools in our hands.

Help is at hand beyond this on-going series of Rehab Corridor Tools posts listed at the bottom of this post.

The odds are you may have also missed Autodesk’s Deep Dive webinar into the Rehab Corridor Tools delivered by Chakri Gavini, the Autodesk Transportation Product Manager. The webinar was delivered right before AU 2017. It also took a while for the recording to be published. Then it was Turkey Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. Watch it.

Don’t skip the Overview about the workflow. Without that key information presented in a couple of slides shown in the video you may struggle to get benefits from the tools.

Webinar Timeline

4:10 - Overview

14:30 - Demo

The video should help make many of the essential Rehab Tools details and mechanics understandable. In other words, the Help file says it, but we still don’t understand what that means.

To Do is To Understand

I watched the video after some significant time spent wrestling with the new Rehab Tools in multiple real world datasets. Yeah. I’m a bit crazy. But I have Framework for Civil 3D customers to please with tools that work. I might make only a couple of minor changes or updates to my previous posts and videos in retrospect.

Nothing is covered or discussed about the often required manual changes to the new Rehab subassemblies.

The video is pretty much about the basic user employment of the new Rehab Tools user interface.

Interesting Takeways

Silly me. I’d have never guessed that you could review the existing surface cross sections down the Alignment by with a manual zoom and pan in the initial Section view viewport without seeing it done. Dooh! Why didn’t I think of that? Talk about non-intuitive. Sorry, Autodesk. I still consider this failure to launch a reasonable visible section to be a bug. Don’t forget to set the Section view Zoom to Offset and Elevation after the first manual one.

The question of what the terms Mill, Level, and Overlay mean within the context and workflow of the dynamic Rehab Assemblies and the tools is answered and clarified.

How the engine determines the cross section low point offset and elevation in the context of Lane parameters on the one or more subassemblies of the cross section. The fact that there often may be more than one of these isn’t expressly talked about.

The Ideal Cross Slope and the relationship to Slope Tolerance is talked about but not explained in significant detail. Given the time constraints of the webinar and the real world complexity of Ideal Cross Slope evaluation in multiple potentially different subassembly situations that isn’t all that unreasonable.

What and How the Relative Gradient evaluation value works is covered in a sentence. Bet you miss that. How, and if, the Relative Gradient relates to the application of Flapping is not.

Most people will probably miss the fact the Rehab Cross Section Correction report is actually a second specialized parameter Section Editor until you really dive into the help file a bit and/or see it done. All these changes vanish if you change the dynamic Rehab Assembly is certain ways. Good news and bad news.

Yes. It might be potentially disturbing that your initial design vertical control can be modified by the results of the applied Rehab parameters. Remember that within the context of evaluating the existing conditions in more than one iterative pass this makes much more sense.

It was no surprise to me that Chakri mentions the need for the use of Best Fit Alignments and Best Fit Profiles tools in the context of the new Rehab Tools workflow. Remember that within the context of evaluating the existing conditions in multiple iterative passes this will make much more sense. I repeat myself. There’s a related post with videos about Best Fits.